This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities. Through a blending of intensive weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon seminars (January 13, February 10, and March 17), students gain expertise in digital skills, methods, and understanding as well as deepen their humanities knowledge. Students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion in addition to our three seminar meetings. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (doctoral thesis, capstone project, coursework, public humanities, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies, informatics, library sciences, museum studies, etc.). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; “distant reading” tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students specializing in Digital Studies or seeking the Digital Studies Certificate. **Any interested graduate student enrolled at Northwestern may take the course as an elective.**

Much recent fiction, film, and theory are concerned with representing the internet and online environments. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema, or telephone. Often, however, it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which digital interfaces appear in cultural discourses in the past 30 years. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? Which narratives are influential and why? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and location? How are gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and location expressed or erased? We will focus on literary and filmic representations of social networking, gaming, news delivery, and artificial intelligence. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be text-based with requirements that you develop close reading strategies, as well as showing a commitment to input and revision of your work. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students specializing in Digital Studies or seeking the Digital Studies Certificate. **Any interested graduate student enrolled at Northwestern may take the course as an elective.**

Big data and the sharing economy are two of the most salient aspects of today’s world. This is true not only in the West, but increasingly so in a developing country like Thailand. Assessing the ethical impact of these emerging technologies take on further complications when it is done in the context of these local cultures. In the talk I will briefly lay out some of the contexts and backgrounds of the problem and then present my analysis, which will be based on insights obtained from Buddhist philosophy as well as from living in the developing world.

Soraj Hongladarom is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He has been working on the more applied areas of philosophy for more than two decades and his focus is on how technology and culture interact, especially with respect to ethical dimensions. Among his works are The Online Self and A Buddhist Theory of Privacy, both published by Springer in 2016. Currently he is completing is a research project as part of an agreement between Indiana University and Chulalongkorn University in Bloomington, Indiana on Spinoza and Buddhism.

Emoji Dick and Emoji Dickinson

Lisa Gitelman

Department of Media, Culture, and Communication New York University

This talk takes a 2010 “translation” of Moby Dick into emoji as an opportunity to consider the conditions of possibility that might delimit books and literature in the contemporary moment. A massive white codex and extended work of crowd-sorcery, “Emoji Dick” points toward the varieties of reading and—especially—of not reading that characterize our ever more digitally mediated and data-described world. Here I proceed by locating “Emoji Dick” alongside an absurd sequel, “Emoji Dickinson.”

Professor Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is currently chair of NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.

Questions? Contact NUDHL co-convener Jillana Enteen, j-enteen@northwestern.edu, or visit nudhl.net. NUDHL is supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and cosponsored by the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

Two faculty members who participated in Northwestern’s Digital Humanities Summer Faculty Workshop offer an update on their digital pedagogy.

Focusing on the radicalism of Spenser’s gender politics, the experimentality of his literary form, and the subversiveness of (some of!) his political agenda, Kasey Evans and her students explore Spenser’s supposed traditionalism through the potential transformations of a multimedia, interactive approach to his work. Can the “sage and serious Spenser,” as John Milton called him, be re-enlivened through the creation and curation of an online archive of texts, commentary, explication, illustrations, in short a digital “Spenserworlds”?

Working on Native American literary studies, Kelly Wisecup discusses the use of digital mapping and archiving platforms in the classroom and how they might be used to engage with literary studies and museum studies. How might digital resources be incorporated into place-based teaching?

The meeting will feature short presentations followed by a discussion.

Studio CHI will be hosting a talk later this month featuring Thomas Haigh. Please consider checking us out and posting the attached flyer to spread the word!

Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin/Madison):

“Working on ENIAC: Memory, Labor and Gender in the Early Digital”February 23, 2017; 6:00 PM
Location: Loop Campus, 14 E. Jackson, CDM Theatre, Daley Building, Room LL105Books and shows about the history of information technology have usually focused on great inventors and technical breakthroughs, while others like operations workers have been written out of the popular history of innovation. In this talk, Thomas Haigh explains that the six women now celebrated as the “first computer programmers” were actually hired as computer operators and worked hands-on with the machine around the clock. Other women, who actually built ENIAC, have been forgotten entirely. His concluding comments relate this historical material to the human labor and physical infrastructure today vanishing from public view into the “cloud.”

DESCRIPTION:

Montfort will present a talk entitled “TBA”, on Monday, December 5 at 10:00 AM in Tech Room L440.

Abstract: TBA.

Bio: Prof. Nick Montfort develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively. He is a professor at MIT and is the principal of the naming firm Nomnym. He lives in New York and Boston.

Montfort earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania, a Masters in creative writing (poetry) from Boston University, a Masters in media arts and sciences from MIT, and undergraduate degrees in liberal arts and computer science from the University of Texas.

Projects of Montfort’s include several very small-scale poetry generators such as the ones in the ppg256 series and Concrete Perl; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written in one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a co-written novel on stickers documented in a book; the interactive fictions Winchester’s Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume; and several other work of digital poetry and art, including the collaborations Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland) and The Deletionist (with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul).

Montfort works in several different contexts, which include the Web, book publication, and the literary reading but also the demoscene (e.g., the collaboration Nanowatt, shown at Récursion in Montréal) and gallery exhibition (e.g, From the Tables of My Memorie, exhibited in Boston and Singapore and the collaborative Boston exhibit Programs at an Exhibition). He translates computational art and writing and organizing the translation project Renderings; his own work has been translated into half a dozen languages. For instance, his free-software computer-generated novel World Clock was translated to Polish and published in ha!art’s Liberatura series, which also includes Finnegans Wake. Many of Montfort’s works have also been modified and transformed by others to become the basis for new work; his short generator Taroko Gorge has been the basis for more than two dozen published remixes.

Please join Project Directors Anaïs Fléchet (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France) and Gabriela Pellegrino Soares (University of São Paulo, Brazil) as well as US Group Leaders Michael J. Kramer (Northwestern University) and Richard Candida Smith (University of California, Berkeley) for a brief introduction to this new digital history/humanities project followed by an opportunity to discuss the project. Faculty and students in all fields welcome. Food and drink provided.

What is Transcultur@? An international collaborative research project led by a Franco-Brazilian team of scholars in the humanities, social sciences, arts, and literature. Its purpose is to produce a “Dictionary” of Transatlantic Cultural History: an online exploration, edited in four languages (English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese), whose aim is to analyze the cultural dynamics of the Atlantic Area and its central role in the modern processes of globalization. Questions? Please contact Michael J. Kramer, History/American Studies/Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory, mjk@northwestern.edu.

Funding provided by Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory; Chabraja Center for Historical Studies; Buffet Institute for Global Studies; Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; France Berkeley Fund; The Institut des Amériques, the Institut Universitaire de France, the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, the European Research Council, and the Fundação de Amparo ao Pesquisador do Estado de São Paulo.

Be sure to join us this Friday as we inaugurate the brand new home of the Multimedia Learning Center in Kresge Hall. We’ve reimagined what an interdisciplinary facility for student learning, scholarship and collaboration can be—and we can’t wait to show it you. Northwestern faculty, staff, and affiliates are all welcome.

Main Event: October 14, 2016 3-5pm

Can’t make it to our main event? Drop by for a special tour the day before, Thursday, October 13, 2016 2-5pm.

Fall Data Workshops

With a nod to both this year’s One Book, One Northwestern selection, “The Signal and The Noise” by Nate Silver, and Weinberg’s recently announced interdisciplinary strategy of “Data, Culture, and Nature”, the MMLC is offering a series of workshops to look at topics of data organization, visualization, and analysis. All faculty, graduate students, and staff are welcome.

“The Story of Data”— Why do we always use tables to organize information? What’s lost? What’s gained?

Wed. Oct. 19, 12-1
Thu. Oct. 20, 11-12
Tue. Nov. 29, 12-1

“Seeing Data” — We can make charts, graphs and maps to “see” data. But is seeing believing?

Tue. Oct. 25, 4-5
Wed. Oct 26, 12-1
Thu. Nov. 30, 12-1

“Correlation vs. Causality” —We know they’re not the always the same, but when are they equal?

Now is the time to apply for HASTAC Scholars, or encourage your students to apply! The application period closes on October 15. Please apply here or share this link with interested colleagues and students: bit.ly/apply-to-hastac-scholars.

All graduate and undergraduate students are welcome to apply. Scholars who identify as members of historically underrepresented or marginalized groups are especially encouraged to apply, as are groups of students who are part of the same program. The application is not lengthy, and the program connects students with a valuable network of peers across the country.

Beginning this year, Scholars will be admitted for a two-year cycle. During their second year, Scholars will be encouraged to take on greater leadership and peer mentoring roles. We think that this extended timeline will go a long way toward building peer mentorship structures and keeping consistent activity and energy on the site year-round.